Tennis legend Martina Navratilova, who has repeatedly entered the arena to fight about the issue of women’s sports and transgender athlete participation in them before, recently fought with a woke tennis reporter, Ben Rothenberg, when he attacked her for spreading what he referred to as “transphobic vitriol.” Navratilova shut him down.
As background, Navratilova has spoken repeatedly about protecting women’s sports. For example, she did so on November 21st with a post on X (formerly Twitter) about transgender individuals competing against women in women’s sports, saying, “Women’s sports is not the place for mediocre male athletes who compete as women. Period.” Similarly, in another post, she said, “What a joke” in response to a transgender cyclist winning a race.
More recently, Navratilova said that, even as a “leftist,” she feels comfortable being a staunch defender of women’s sports, and thinks the vandals who attacked a “Take Back Title IX” bus don’t care about women. She said, “So am I and so are hundreds of thousands of women who support us. I should say millions, actually. I am a leftist. I would call the people who did this cowards and anarchists who don’t give a shit about women.”
Responding to her, Ben Rothenberg, a tennis reporter and host of the @NCR_Tennis podcast, accused Navratilova of spreading “transphobic vitriol.” He wrote, “Martina Navratilova turning this anti-trans crusade into her life’s obsession in recent years remains dispiriting!” He continued, “And she turns it into way more transphobic vitriol than just discussing sports fairness, as I’ve covered before, just being nasty and cruel and dehumanizing. Boo.”
She utterly shut Rothenberg down with a reply, saying, “Yet another man telling women what they should care about. And who are you exactly ? Oh yeah, the reporter who tells tennis players its off the record and then prints what they said anyway. Good to know you care about women’s sports and women’s sex based spaces. I care.”
Rothenberg, in response to Nabratilova’s post, wrote, “I’ve never done that. But I care also, about someone who was a beacon of freedom and inclusion in the sport I’ve covered sadly choosing to erode the platform she built with cyberbullying campaigns aimed at obscure, low-level amateur athletes. I wish you were better than that.”
Then, in yet another post about the matter, Rothenberg wrote, “(Been wild to see when these folks have swarmed my mentions how for so many of them, this issue has become their entire personality on this website. Fighting this trans boogeyman by trawling super obscure amateur sports events for examples becomes an obsession, a lifestyle.)”
Responding, one commenter said, in a post to which Navratilova replied “for the ratio,” as she put it, “You really are the worst, Ben. You sneer at and belittle women for standing up for our right to our own sports and our own spaces like women’s crisis shelters, locker rooms and prisons, then pretend to be deeply shocked at how important it is to us when we respond. Your misogyny really knows no bounds.”
Featured image credit: By Angela George, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16699305
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